


fractured soul

by lethandralis



Series: like an infection gone septic; part of his blood [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Medical stuff, Suicidal Ideation, Transphobia, Violence, death talk, general distrust of the psychiatric profession, here's another really sad thing for you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:36:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8249354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethandralis/pseuds/lethandralis
Summary: you cannot come through being murdered by your own brother without having something to show for it.





	

It has always been this way, at least a little. The frivolous and outgoing child of an austere criminal empire, now and forever, just grown into a different shape in his adulthood. An outcast, a black sheep, weird, strange. People look at him now, clad in his full-body metal skin, just as they did when he was younger, skinny and awkward with a cracking voice and green hair. Where his brother stood, twenty-seven and already with that cold, cold look in his eye, still as a statue and just as hard, he danced through, never in one place for long enough to bring the hand of fate down upon him.

It is later, now, and different in a sense. He has changed; his body has changed, his place in the world has changed, his career has changed. His life now bears no resemblance to the tension of his early twenties, to the easygoing socializing of his youth. He lives in a series of little shoebox dormitory rooms in Overwatch Watchpoints, hopping around as commanders inform him he is needed. Never in one place for long.

He likes it that way, always has. Back in Hanamura his family joked that they’d install a tracking chip in him just so that they could find him from moment to moment.

(When he had been making negations with Dr. Ziegler about the construction of his new prosthetic exoskeleton, he had made her promise not to include anything that could give away his location remotely. He has a custom-made Overwatch communicator, now, with the standard GPS unit, but that he can at least take off.)

Tonight it is breezy and cold, already pitch black. He hasn’t got a mission coming up for a week, and in the interim he’s in Switzerland, his favorite Watchpoint. The cold keeps him awake, keeps him sharp, bites into his remaining nerve endings and holds there, a vicegrip. It hasn’t started snowing for the year, not quite yet, but it will soon. Forecast says next week they might get a few flurries. Genji reminds himself to ask about a new weatherproofing treatment; his last one is beginning to wear off.

On the roof of the main dormitory building, yards and yards away from anyone else, Genji sits with his phone and a large blanket. He ought to be asleep. Tomorrow morning he’s scheduled for calisthenics and tactical training with Commander Amari, but he’s done it on no sleep before, and he can do it again. What he can’t accomplish on his own he can weasel his way out of on charm and pity.

These downtimes are bad for him, and he’s accepted that. He likes the missions, even when they’re weeks long, even when the stakeouts drag on for days and he’s running on caffeine and prayer. The grueling work, the long recon ops, the endless stealthy sneaks through heavily armed compounds. All of it is something for him to do, something for him to think about. It keeps his mind working. If he’s occupied, he can’t think about other things.

It’s times like this, right now on the roof in Geneva, times where he’s under orders to rest and recuperate and recharge, that things go south fast. He spends long hours alone, wandering around, going on walks, lazing around in his room. Thinking of things he’d rather not remember. Once, a few months ago, Reinhardt had walked up behind him in the kitchen in Gibraltar and he’d jumped so hard that the older man had spent twenty minutes apologizing.

“Are you alright? I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean to—“

“Fine,” Genji had said, leaving without his tea.

Genji is thankful that all Watchpoints are equipped with locking doors on agent quarters. Often he walks into his quarters at four in the afternoon, clicks the lock shut behind him, and does not leave until seven the next evening. Sleeping no longer feels the same, but there’s a blankness in it that soothes him, sometimes. Sometimes he just needs to not exist a while.

At the Watchpoint in Grand Mesa there’s a therapist, a syrup-sweet woman with greying hair and the smile of someone who has something to prove. She’d tried her tactics out on him, once, when a few ops got cancelled and he’d been stuck there for a month.

On the stiff couch in her office, she’d gotten him to talk, and he’d talked, harsh and bitter and frank. Too numb to hurt. “My brother murdered me because our clan said it should be so,” he’d said, staring at her as she’d taken notes with a steel ballpoint pen on a yellow legal pad. A clock in the far corner ticked down the minutes in a steady, horrid rhythm. “I was brought on as an Overwatch agent in exchange for my revival by Doctor Zeigler, because she thought I might be useful in our efforts against the Shimada clan.”

The therapist had clicked her pen and smiled at him, sadly, like one might at a wounded animal. “Oh, Genji. I’m _so sorry_.”

Genji had scowled at her. As if any of her idiotic words could even begin to smooth him over. As if she could bridge the gap between their histories. As if she had any sort of reason to care outside of the steady paycheck with benefits that Overwatch offered to all of its employees.

The fucking _audacity_.

To this day, Genji continues to avoid her whenever he ends up in Grand Mesa.

He’s tried therapists before, both before and after what happened, with and without his consent. When he was seventeen he’d walked into his parent’s bedroom clad in a new name, new clothes, a new haircut, a new identity, and his parents had send him straight to a man who’d spent two hours every Friday afternoon trying to talk him back down from all of it. Tried to talk him down from _himself_. He’d resisted as hard as he could, and the moment he’d come of age he had every appointment cancelled and personally told his now-former therapist where he ought to shove his diagnoses.

When he was twenty, he’d stolen a large sum of family money for a surgery he’d had performed up in Korea, under the guise of going on a trip with his friends from university. His parents, now exhausted, gave up the fight. He supposes now that this might have been the beginning of his downfall; the fucked up daughter-turned-son of the Shimada empire became too broken to even hope to save.

Even now, as a twenty-eight-year-old man thousands of miles away, Genji can remember overhearing the hushed conversations around the compound. The gossip about him, the glares, the outright gawking at the shape he’d modelled himself into.

After a while, he’d started making himself scarce at home when he could.

The handful of stars visible here are out, now, and he tries to identify them but gives up halfway through. He could look up a star chart if he cared. Too much effort on something he’s doing in a half-assed attempt to distract himself, anyway.

His phone vibrates in his hands. A news alert. Three bodies discovered in a ditch twenty kilometers south of Hanamura, fingerprints burned off and teeth removed. Genji shudders, swiping the notification away. The technique sounds like someone he knows.

He tries not to think about Hanamura when he can help it. His home for the first twenty-five years of his life. It will always stick with him, he thinks, lodged into his memory too deep to dislodge, like a splinter driven too deep into the skin. Like an infection gone septic, part of his blood.

He’s been asked, several times, to lead ops against the Shimada clan in various parts of Japan. Within the past six months the offers have become extravagant; six months’ paid leave, clearance to choose a Watchpoint of choice and stay there. New things, more money, anything he could ask for and that the UN can sanction the money for. He always declines. “I will provide any intelligence I can give,” he says, every time, “but I do not wish to go there. Not now, not ever. I wish your agents the best of luck.”

Every time, Jack gives him this long-suffering glare, like someday he’s just got to crack and hop on a transport to Hanamura. Like it would be so easy, like Genji is just being _so fucking difficult_ by not toughening up and climbing into an airplane, destination: The Place Where I Died.

Genji tries not to talk to Jack much more than he needs to.

The next mission they have him on is an easy one, down in Africa, monitoring a supposedly defunct omnium. Missions like this suit him – long covert things, always with the promise of action dangling just out of his reach. They keep him going. Keep him sane. Too much fighting and he loses control, too little and he gets antsy.

It had been harder when he first joined on. As he acclimated himself to his new body and his new rage, he had gone overboard. Overexerted himself, threw himself into every mission he could sink his teeth into.  When he wasn’t allowed to be on missions, he was in training simulations, always moving. He went days without sleep, without eating. Several times he’d had to be extracted from a fight simply because his body had given out underneath him.

It was a long year.

He’s learned to tone it down, partially due to the consistent and withering nagging of one Dr. Ziegler, who insisted that while she appreciated the fact that he made her work for her paychecks, she would really terribly appreciate not having to bring him back to life _again, please._ He’d sighed, as if the victim of a longstanding inside joke made at his expense, and promised every single time that he’d do better next time.

There are fewer scratches and dents in his armor, now, and he has to go under for repairs less frequently. His brain still itches, his soul still aches, there are still some nights where he feels himself coming apart at every seam, one by one. It will probably always be this way. _I died_ , he says to the people trying to bring him down from the edge of that great looming abyss. _I died and I was brought back to life, and I cannot go through that without scars. I can cover them up all I like, but they are still there. You cannot come through being murdered by your own brother without having something to show for it._

There isn’t coping with this, he doesn’t think. There isn’t a way to cope with everything he’s been through, with waking up in a country you’ve never been to to find you’re only about 40 percent of a human being, that all of your bodily functions are now being performed by machines that beep and whir and hum at all hours of the day.

Genji has two brothers, as far as he is concerned. He has Hanzo, young and soft, still with the ability to smile and laugh and crack awful jokes. The brother who ran laps around their home with him, who stayed up late watching old movies with him, who cheered the loudest at his graduation ceremonies. And he has _Hanzo_ , older and hardened and cruel, cutting Genji down with a razor sharp blade stained red. The brother who killed him. His brother, the murderer. He cannot reconcile the two. They are different. He cannot figure out where one ends and the other begins.

Perhaps he never will.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter anymore. As far as Genji is concerned, his brother is dead, or maybe rotting away in prisonLogically, his brother is probably just fine, leading their family as he was destined to with a firm hand and an analytical mind. But it helps, some days, to imagine a tombstone in the place where his big brother one stood.

Silence has now overtaken the Watchpoint entirely. Everyone without something better to do is probably asleep. An ice-cold wind blows through, and Genji shivers inside his blanket. _Time to go._ He’s got someplace better to be at this time of night.

Thankfully, it is late enough now that nobody watches him climb down the side of the building, comforter over his shoulder. Likewise, nobody watches him, slumped over and shivering, as he walks to his quarters in silence. He finds himself thankful for this meager privacy.

The doors of his quarters click shut behind him, and he falls into bed before drifting into a short, dreamless sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> here's some more sad shit about them shimada boys! carrot instead of artichoke, this time.  
> i've got a third work in the oven for this series about the both of them (in the same place and time!), and then maybe i will write something happy again.  
> [tumblr](http://lethandral1s.tumblr.com) || [twitter](http://twitter.com/lethandralis)


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